Tips to Keep Translation Costs Within Reason

January 18, 2017 Nima Henry

Globalization is not an option if you truly want to gain access to a global audience; it is a necessity. However, for many small businesses, the cost factor may be a huge deterrent in pursuing globalization of content very efficiently. If you are having second thoughts about paying up for translation for your pages into languages that may make communication better across the world, it may be good news for you that you can do this quite affordably. Here are some tips you should keep in mind to keep translation within a tight budget.

Think global right from Step 1

When globalization is an afterthought, you end up spending a lot of money on tweaking web design and back end so that this is actually possible. Apart from the extra cost you shoulder, you also pave the way for delay in bringing your content in front of your global audience, overlooking globalization right from step 1. This should be part of the plan right from the design and development stage so that you can create a universal template that only needs minor changes, at worst, to deliver efficiently translated content.

Keep it simple, content wise

The simpler and more straight forward your content is, the easier it is to translate without major problems or mismatches. When translation is an easy job, you can get it done affordably too. Go with complex content that has convoluted phrases and highly region specific phrases or word usages and you need experts to do your translation justice. Experts equal higher cost so always make sure that your content is simple and direct. This is also the best way to ensure that you don’t inadvertently have content that translates into inappropriate or confusing messages in another language.

Standardize your translation

Creating a standard practice for translations makes it easy to get output that is uniform across the board. It makes things easy for your translators to understand what you expect and how to style the translated content to suit the tone and voice that you seek to maintain. Remember that you content reflects your business’ voice and you want to match the origin as closely as possible with the translated content. Also, having a fixed template or series of process guidelines for translation allows you the freedom to choosing reasonably proficient translation professional instead of needing the services of experts, who will charge you a whole lot more. Plus, the standardization helps you quickly verify if your needs have been met to the desired level, enabling quick turnaround times.

Leverage the power of translation memory

Translation memory technology is a big help when cost cutting is top of your priorities list in translating your content to make it globally usable. With this technology, you can actually store translated text strings that match source text in a database so that it can be reused later on by others. This database can later be accessed whenever similar content is being used on a global level. If used efficiently, you can eliminate the need to hire translators for projects that contain content that has been translated before. That is not all. Translation memory technology allows you to maintain a record of sorts of the work done by the experts on your initial; project so that you can compare and quality check future iterations against this master copy, evaluate their quality and ensure that there is consistence and uniformity in the translation. In time you may actually be able to avoid hiring third parties to handle your translation and do it yourself with the help of your data base.